By Brian R Sorrell
I called my mom on Easter Sunday, trying to bridge the distance between us and capture a feeling that I live nearby. But I don’t. Those days are past. I’m nine thousand miles away, though I might as well be on the moon, as she sees it. We communicate through outer space anyway. To be honest,… Read more
When my giggling four-year-old runs over to me with a scribbled blob of paint on construction paper, yelling “look look!” and I instinctively ask him “what is it,” his grin fades and he stops giggling and he has to think about what to say. An unwelcome interruption by reason. He isn’t excited about what it is. He’s… Read more
Christmas morning always smelled of pine trees and new clothes, and it’s strange how April in the southern hemisphere reminds me of those days. The weather turned from summer to autumn on Monday morning, and with it comes a shift in wardrobe and attitude. I opened the front door and it didn’t stick in the… Read more
The day has finally come. Noodle realises it’s annoying and funny to repeat everything you say. “Everything you say,” he says. Yeah. Everything. Now please stop while I write this. I suppose it’s my fault, at least to some extent. I love to annoy him by pretending to mishear things. “Daddy can I have a… Read more
In the replica of the John Bain Toy Shop at the Canterbury Museum there is a doll house, known as the Historic Dunedin House, which on 22 February 2011 suffered damage in a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. Little replica people still look on in dismay at their knocked over china and chairs, frozen in time. One… Read more
I am standing here, stunned, in heavy shifting winds strong as the waves turning rock to sand. I am at one end of one very small country a very long way from any other, and impossibly far from the first place I called home. This is Cape Reinga, the northernmost tip of New Zealand, where the… Read more
Some years back I learned the chemistry of drying — paints and oils and sweat — and knowing that stuff matters plenty if you’re engineering or inventing or experimenting, but it don’t mean a whit when you’re joining and polishing maple and walnut and cherry and holly and good old fashioned oak into a little… Read more
My grandfather did a lot of my raising and my son was born a hundred years after him, nearly to the day, give or take a couple weeks. On a timeline that long, a couple weeks isn’t more than a cup of morning coffee. I stand in between them, a bit closer to my boy’s… Read more
It occurred to me last week that one day soon Noodle will have his first day of school and I’ll be a proud papa, misty-eyed holding his hand, and he his lunchbox, down the path to his first classroom. The moment I let go and he walks through the door with his friends, everything changes.… Read more
This morning Charlie woke up and found the breakfast I had left for him and the toy cars and blocks I had lined up last night after he went to bed and I knew he would stay occupied for a while so I drifted back to sleep because it was a crisp late spring morning and… Read more
It’s time to straighten the pictures on the wall, sweep up Winter’s dust and degrease the kitchen and bicycle. The little boy won’t need baths every day because he’s got the sea and nobody to answer to. Summer shine is coming and with it we’ll lay even further back into days of cheeseburger lethargy and… Read more
As storms roll out past the setting sun, the gray clouds brighten at the edges, an orange green lighting the spring grass, twinkling in Noodle’s eyes. He shouts and points with both hands: “Look! Mirror clouds!” I warn him it looks like rain and we might have to take our parade inside if cats and… Read more
Yesterday the clouds were a line of bunnies running with a birthday cake. Lately, Noodle exercises his eyes, notices distances, and writes fables into the sky. He’s becoming a dreamer. And he’s taken to creating characters and conversations in the creatures and the places we visit. One sunny winter day, we took him to Ambury… Read more
On the car ride back from his cousins’ house, well past bedtime, his face glowing in the pale low-pressure sodium lights outside the turnpike toll plaza, Noodle asked whether we would still love him if he lost a hand. I checked the rearview to see if he was giggling out a cheeky ruse, but he… Read more
In his Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy says “a mans at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.” I used to share this sentiment, but I find I’m growing further from it these days. More and more my little boy expresses traits I wasn’t equipped to perceive in… Read more